How on earth do you let go?

[Longdogs]

Personally, I think once you decide to move to another property, that's the point where you have to 'let go'.

What I do find sad is that the memories are not passed on. For instance, I sometimes pass the house where my grandparents lived for around forty years. They have now passed on but the owners of today would have no idea how much I enjoyed playing in the garden where they now live.

 

[worms]

What I do find sad is that the memories are not passed on. For instance, I sometimes pass the house where my grandparents lived for around forty years. They have now passed on but the owners of today would have no idea how much I enjoyed playing in the garden where they now live.

But sometimes these memories do catch up. By separate sets of coincidences, we have had three different strands of stories of people who spent happy times visiting our current property. One of them, when their grandparents lived here, one when their cousins lived here (both of these describing features in the garden which still exist) and another told of dinner parties and the time and trouble that had been taken to find the right piece of wood for the mantelpiece. Their stories have enriched our knowledge of the house ... and I now feel less inclined to get rid of that hideous mantelpiece!

 

[Penners]

This story isn't so much about recovered memories, but it is nevertheless about an amazing period property coincidence.

We have friends who have lived in France for over 20 years. Prior to this, they lived in Oxfordshire in a beautiful stone cottage that the husband renovated himself, in a village where Mrs P and I rented for a few months while we were house-hunting. Our friends' house has a very unusual name.

A few days ago we were lunching with my daughter and she said, "Dad, didn't you used to rent a place [villagename]?" I confirmed this.

She then said, "Oh, some friends of ours have just bought a beautiful cottage in that village with a very unusual name - it's [cottagename]!"

Sure enough it was the same house - renovated by our friends and now bought (after two interim owners) by my daughter's friends!

 

[Feltwell]

We have friends from university days who emigrated some years ago to Australia, every 3 years or so they come back to the UK and do the round of the relatives - but they also generally get a holiday cottage somewhere and invite the crowd of friends from university days to come round. It's an event we all look forward to, even though we're now at the stage where some of our kids are thinking about university!

Anyway, last but one time they came back to the UK, my friend was looking for a holiday cottage - and a rather poignant one came up. In his words:-

Turns out that the house has an interesting history. Sometime around 1971 it was sold to a young woman who'd just lost her husband to a heart attack shortly after the birth of her second son. Newly widowed, she'd had to sell the family Ironmongers in Marlow, and moved to Bourton with a five year old and a new baby. She gave her new home the name Kimkeri after her late husband, Keri, and her dog, Kim (the order of which says something about her priorities, I guess).

The woman was, of course, my mum, I was the baby and it's the house where I spent the first few years of my life.

The house had changed quite a bit but was still called Kimkeri, and my friend distinctly remembered the pattern of the encaustic tiles on the hallway floor, and the leaded lights in the front door - even though he was very young when they moved out. His mum had died just a few years previously so it was a nice connection for him back to her.

He was talking to a woman in her late 50's who lived next door about the story, and she suddenly stopped him - turns out she had always lived in that house, having inherited it from her parents, and she remembered babysitting my friend and his brother when she was a teenager.

Anyway, the owners lived & worked abroad, it was their house which they rented out via an agency. My friend left them a note describing the story and why their house had that name, which they almost certainly would not have been aware of.

I've recently found out who lived here from 1965 up until 1987 - a brewery employee and his family, they were the last tenants and bought the house from the brewery in 1987, selling it almost immediately as sadly the husband died. I'm hoping the son, who grew up here, can share some details on this house and hopefully some pictures, as we know the house was pretty much untouched and all original then.

 

[Penners]

Blimey, Feltwell, what an amazing (and rather poignant) story! Puts mine in the shade!

 

[Feltwell]

It was certainly one hell of a coincidence Penners - not just that it was in use as a holiday cottage (it isn't any more) but that it was also available and was found by my friend - especially as he's not always the most organised so I suspect it was a late booking! It was a nice place and I think it meant a lot to him to go back there, especially as he found that it did stir some childhood memories.

 

[philpjuk100]

I see this from the other side,our house was restored well from a ruin before we bought it and I feel guilt when carrying out modifications/redecorations.The seller moved to be near his family in NZ so will probably never see what I have done but I always think "I hope Clive would approve" when working on the house.We have his drawings with future mods pencil drawn on them.The only thing I cannot forgive him for is replacing a dormer with a velux window but I have the drawings so may reverse this (sorry Clive)

 

[jocelyn plummer]

We too have recently experienced an extraordinary period property co-incidence----my Other half has been beating for the local shoot which is owned by the Spencer family. At the end of a very chilly shoot just before Christmas, OH got talking to one of the 'guns ' who said he was about to drive back to Oxford.

Always proud of his Oxford background, OH explained his connection to Oxford (old schoool tie and all that stuff) ---it turns out that the 'gun' not only has his children at the prep school where my sister in law is property manager and where there has been an unbroken Plummer line at the school for 60 years, but that he is living in the very house where OH's Father was house master and where OH was brought up----such an odd co-incidence to come out of a conversation in the middle of a very muddy maize field in the middle of North Norfolk on a chilly evening.

Just as a clue that prep school is slap bang in the middle of the 'golden triangle' in Oxford and the surrounding house prices now have more naughts on the end than we could ever have written down, let alone fund!

 

[mims&pip]

I'm loving all these period property coincidence stories

Ours is nowhere near as interesting*, but about four years ago we sold an item via our online business and it turned out the buyer lived in the Hampshire house where DH grew up and lived from a baby till his parents sold it in the 1980s when he was about sixteen. It was too good an opportunity to miss and therefore DH contacted the buyer, explaining his history with the house and offering to deliver it personally. On his arrival our customer/current owner of DH's childhood home invited him in and gave him the guided tour.....apparently very little had changed during the intervening years, although the 1970s wallpaper DH remembered his parents hanging was long gone :lol:

*and not nearly as 'period' as the house in question dated from the 1950s

 

[Penners]

My aunt's butcher once walked past the house where his father had delivered half a pound of lambs' kidneys to the Duke of Beaufort's subaltern's second cousin. Two weeks later he walked past the same house again (although in the opposite direction).

Does that qualify?

 

[worms]

My aunt's butcher once walked past the house where his father had delivered half a pound of lambs' kidneys to the Duke of Beaufort's subaltern's second cousin. Two weeks later he walked past the same house again (although in the opposite direction).

Does that qualify?

Hold on, my aunt had a butcher too! Are we related?

 

[mims&pip]

My aunt's butcher once walked past the house where his father had delivered half a pound of lambs' kidneys to the Duke of Beaufort's subaltern's second cousin. Two weeks later he walked past the same house again (although in the opposite direction).

Does that qualify?

No. Lol :lol: :lol: :lol:

 

[Penners]

Hold on, my aunt had a butcher too! Are we related?

Not unless the coincidence stretches to shoe shops, too. Did you ever visit one? If so, we must surely be able to trace common antecedence (not that there's anything common about my forebears).